Community Land Ownership, Housing and Sustainable Rural Communities

Abstract

Land availability for affordable housing in rural areas is tied to competing discourses of sustainability that are set in the context of constructed idylls. This paper argues that the dominance of these myths owes to their support networks of power relations that govern the availability and use of key resources, amongst them land. The paper questions what happens to power relations when the land tenure regime changes and how this change impacts on the discourses of sustainability. It interprets the results of an initial investigation of community land buy-outs. The paper suggests that community purchase leads to a continuous renegotiation of power relations and to a rebalancing of the dimensions of sustainability. Community land trusts therefore emerge as sustainable models for tackling the question of land availability.

Notes

1. This is sometimes inappropriately transplanted north of the Border.

2. The terminology is that adopted by the former state development agency, the Highlands and Islands Development Board, and continued by its successor, the Highlands and Islands Enterprise.

3. Although it is not, by itself, a panacea.

4. And new housing provision cannot be seen as the solution: it creates short-term employment benefits but is likely to displace demand and compound local area decay.

5. The Abolition of Feudal Tenure (Scotland) Act, 2000; The Title Conditions (Scotland) Act, 2003; and, The Land Reform (Scotland) Act, 2003.

6. As argued by Satsangi (2007), legislation adopted a fairly uncritical notion of ‘community’.

7. Crofts are small agricultural landholdings, subject to special legislation beginning with the Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act, 1886. This legislation was largely a response to the complaints and demands of tenant families who were victims of the Highland Clearances. The tenure is restricted to Scotland's seven crofting counties: Inverness-shire, Ross and Cromarty, Argyll-shire, Sutherland, Caithness, Orkney and Shetland.

8. See http://www.scrol.gov.uk/scrol/browser/profile.jsp?profile=Population&mainLevel=Postcode&mainText=PA417AB&mainTextExplicitMatch=true&compLevel=CountryProfile&compArea=Scotland&compText=&compTextExplicitMatch=true

9. And capital raised by the islanders themselves.